October 24, 2005

As some of you might know I am back in Kansas City for the next few days while the final acceptability testing for my project is done. Staying in the same hotel as before which is cool. The funny part is that the last time I was here I had a huge suitcase and my room was on the second floor and this time I am carrying a laptop case and a backback my room is on the firstfloor (Ground floor to all the people in India).

The trip here was interesting too, my flight left Newark at 6:40 am to Cleveland from where I caught a connecting flight to Kansas City (The earliest direct flight was at 3 pm). I got to the Newark airport at 5:30 am and since I had no luggage I was able to check-in using the eticket counter without having to stand in line. The flight got delayed so I landed in Clevland 25 mins before my flight was supposed to depart and the gate was all the way across the airport. I ran all the way there and was the second last person to board the plane before they stopped boarding.

Overall an interesting trip so far. Now its time for me to sleep, so that I can wakeup early tomorrow.

October 19, 2005

Did I mention that I really really dislike Derby? No.. Well now you know.
What on earth is wrong with the Derby developers, is it really really that hard to print sensible error messages? It is? Then maybe they need to hire a 4 year old as they would be able to suggest some more intelligent error messages. Don’t believe me? Check out the following error message:

Is it really so hard to just say that ‘blahs’ doesn’t exist like any other DB would? If thats not enough there is no way of looking at the table structure (At least not that I could find) or my personal faveroite: no way todump an entire DB to a file for archiving or convertion to another DB. Every other DB I have worked with has let me do this but derby… Arrghh…

In case you are wondering I wasted almost all day today with Scott trying to export data from Derby to Postgresql. Finally Scott ended up creating a Java program to read the data from derby and create SQL statements which can them be imported in any DB.

If any Derby developer is reading this: get your act together, the goal is not to make an impossible to use DB (Though if it was then you have suceeded) it is to make a simple and user friendly system… Go read a few books on usability

October 17, 2005

Got tired of the feedback spam, I was literally getting ~20 entries in my guesbook a day that just contain links to porn sites and poker sites etc. Added some more code to make it difficult for automated submissions from suceeding. Lets hope it works. If not I will have to add some sort of test (like the one used by yahoo and other sites to prevent automated creation of accounts) to the section.

October 16, 2005

This past week has been ‘interesting’. Lets see what all I have been through:

Sunday:

Spend over 6 hours sitting at the Kansas City Airport waiting for my flight to NJ to depart. Got ‘randomly’ selected for a special screen by the airport security. Poor guys were confused about the functions of all the cables and wires in my laptop bag. Arrived in NJ at almost 1:30 am. Got home at 2 am. It was raining

Monday:

Was decent. Spent all day sleeping and relaxing. Fun Didn’t go out at all since it was raining all day.

Tuesday:

Still raining, had to drive to work, the 45 min drive took over 1 1/2 hours. Not fun. Spent all day at work, wanted to meet friends but since it was still raining had to do a rain check.

Wednesday:

Still raining. Had some stuff to take care of at NJIT and the bank so dropped Vinit and Surabhi at work and walked to the office and then toof the subway to the bank. I must have been out in the rain for maybe 10 mins but I was completely soaked. Thankfully all my electronics survived the soaking without damage. Then I was trying to get to work found out that half the roads were flooded, and after waiting in traffic for about 2 hours made a U turn and came back home to work from there… After parking the car when I was walking back to the apartment I got splashed by a truck driving through a huge puddle. Not fun.

Thursday:

Still raining. Reached work in an hour. Spent all day testing GUI’s and my application with the new DB. Pretty busy day. Couldn’t go out as it was still raining.

Friday:

Still raining!!! Reached work in about 1 1/2 hours. Worked all day on testing GUI’s on the new DB. Stayed at work till about 10 pm, got home at 11:30 (Roads were flooded so had to take a lot of detours)

Getting really tired of rain.

Saturday:

Finally its not raining… Woke up early to help with load testing our system and spent all day setting it up. The one day it wasn’t raining I was working

Sunday:

Went to bed at 5 am (was watching movies to de-stress) work up early to help with load testing again. This time it wasn’t that bad got to take some time off to visit Vivek and Ruth in the city, had lunch with them and then had towork from his apartment for a little while. Then came back home to watch the system and see if it worked. Thankfully it did So we also did our failover tests and they passed

Watched episodes from the series ‘Birds of Prey’, awesome series too bad it was cancelled. Going to work on my website now.